With an understanding of HTML and the fundamentals of CSS, you’re ready to create your first web pages with a sense of design and style.

It’s important to understand that design in web development suggests how pages be displayed. CSS is not a series of ironbound rules. Web pages are fluid by default: content automatically flows inside the browser, scaling and wrapping to fit on any screen. Design may constrain or enhance that behavior, but it is only ever a guide for web content.

Web page layout is very broadly divided into two categories: “fluid” and “fixed”. Fixed layout is the easiest to implement, and what we’ll start with here. Fluid design – also known as responsive design – is more challenging, but we’ll do a little of that too.

Further Resources

When You’re Done

Creating one page is just the beginning: placing your styles in a linked style sheet (as you should be) suggests that you will be making many more pages using the same presentation. In that case, you’ll need navigation – ideally, more than a raw list of links – so styling site navigation is what we’ll look at next.